A bittersweet poetic journey that occasionally strays too far from home.
Foley explores family, grief, and loss in this poetry collection.
The primary guiding characteristic of Foley’s collection is that the book alternates between different periods of the author’s life and varying degrees of closeness with her three sisters. In “Prism,” Foley describes a family of four girls helmed by a veteran father, “his nerves still raw / from four years as prisoner of war, / his wounds still glistening, / red as raspberries.” “A Gated Community” recalls her estranged sister Claire’s death in a bathtub left running, which “wept through / the neighbor’s wall.” “Now the Repairman,” “My Uninvestigated Sister,” and “Whispering Death” grapple with the practical and legal aftermath of that death, including household repairs, neighbors filing suit over flood damage, and unanswered questions about a bloody sink in her sister’s Texas town home. “A Zoom Memorial” captures the sisters’ distinct personalities via their squares on the screen. In “No Headstone,” Foley honors Claire by placing her ashes near a maple tree while also revisiting the loss of Foley’s parents and how each returned to the Earth: her mother through burial and her father via ashes scattered in New York Harbor. “Claire,” the penultimate poem in the collection, leaves readers with a haunting note: The poet is in a seaside home, sensing her sister in the moonlight and noticing how grief still “stuns me with an ache / I can’t undo.” Foley deftly captures the way loss can infiltrate and completely take hold of one’s life. The book’s cyclical return to Claire’s death mimics post-traumatic flashbacks, and the poet’s struggle to adapt to life after loss is relatable in lines like “I can’t tell when I’ll be my own again— // when words will mean what they once meant.” Though the collection is mostly somber, entries like “Poem to My Fallopian Tube” and “Letter to Squirrel, in Time of War” temporarily lighten the mood. A few poems, however, delve into global unrest and thus feel out of place, given the family theme.
A bittersweet poetic journey that occasionally strays too far from home.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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